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[Music] hi my name is benz weibelson and i'm one of the design educators here at the joint special operations university or jso and json provides education to the u.s special operations command or socom enterprise to include international partners agencies department of defense and beyond in my case my team we provide design education and this is going to be another one of our facilitation videos where we talk about scenario planning and a technique that json uses to rapidly get a design team to think about multiple futures very quickly and a diverse range of futures now if you want to check out other facilitation videos that we have be sure to subscribe to this think jsow website or channel and check out the facilitation series to include our day one jaws exercise we also have a puzzle exercise and a paper roll exercise that have the breakdown of how to do the techniques the learning objectives and the facilitation notes for each one of those so even at a strategic level or all the way down to a tactical level militaries and security organizations tend to look at projecting the future and rationalizing uh their planning process and their strategy making in a systematic logic and and we'll explain that in the next series of images and slides and graphics now systematic processes are very effective for convergent thinking for short effects or in simplistic or complicated environments where there's enough of an ability for us to project effects reliably and with risk reduction increased efficiency and sometimes an illusion of control cause and effect tend to be linked now when we are facing contacts and security challenges that do not fall into these types of narrow categories are attempts to establish one single desired future and then move towards it in a reverse engineered process it doesn't work well and the more complex and dynamic a security challenge is the increasingly more insufficient these processes are [Music] the two terms systematic and systemic logic need to be briefly explained first before explaining scenario planning and why it is of value for security design contacts you may wonder why existing detailed planning approaches are not already sufficient for any security organization to continue applying in complex challenges after all the modern managerial movement that emerged from the industrial revolution and massive national endeavors such as political and military activities spanning the great wars or the subsequent cold war these inculcated a precise end state-oriented and largely mechanistic way to organize people and resources to act towards purposeful ends this mode of organizational decision-making and coordinating actions in time and space is best summarized as systematic and the modern world's only recognized and approved form of performance choice we choose to approach nearly all of life's challenges systematically where the true goal of the system the reason it programs itself like a computer is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output we demand that a clear standardized and linear path be constructed at least cognitively so that we can derive an output from every input and therefore an already established solution that we design beforehand can be readily taken off the shelf and applied with some modification to the problem encountered thus systematic logic for sequencing all actions in time and space for most every unit group organization company and even nation state tends to be represented by very elaborate arrangements and categorizations of inputs linked to outputs that are analytic and attempt to standardize reduce risk increase prediction and otherwise provide the expectation of increased control over time with the accumulation of more information more experience and more repetitions within what is perceived as a stable reality this produces as what dr christopher paparone explains as clear specification towards the industrial-like reproducibility of individual and organizational roles and activities that gives a sense of disambiguation and orderliness the logic of systematic thinking is written into dozens upon dozens of how-to manuals covering a wide spectrum of subjects available in breathtaking detail unquote in turn most every organization approaches the future in the same systematic outlook that today's input should correspond to tomorrow's output or desired end state the linear path then becomes an engineering or largely a mathematical problem to be worked out with standard risks resources or ways and means to go about linking the input to the output in clear and often standardized concepts using uniform or universal language that correspond to the institutional best practices for planning the problem with thinking about the future in these starkly systematic terms is that complex dynamic systems feature high levels of emergence and these phenomena reject such systematic logics outright systematic logic works best in simple or complicated systems where there is a higher level of stability indeed cause leads to an effect in either extremely predictable ways in simple systems or in relatively reliable patterns in complicated systems emergence in these systems tends to be simple emergence that can still largely work within these settings where systematic planning logic will do an organization plenty of utility however in complex and chaotic systems the future is going to be remarkably unpredictable and any attempt to use systematic logic will result in the organization anticipating and preparing for a future that may not occur but also likely becoming dangerously cavalier or overconfident that their future models and their strategic outlooks are sound valuable or even proven in some institutionally sanctioned and approved sense [Music] instead of systematic planning for the future where an organization uses a management by objectives recipe style structure taking a systemic approach to the future orients on complex dynamic systems that are emergent non-linear and at times entirely unpredictable affairs to consider future action within the emphasis on analytic logic alone is reduced with systemic logic emphasizing multiple relational forms of knowledge as well as a different although often competing and paradoxical way of making sense of the same reality this does not mean that there are different truths about reality rather that humans take an already complex dynamic reality and add another layer of socially constructed complexity on top where we have different ideas and meaning concerning various truths lurking deeper within that first layer of complex reality systemic thinking acknowledges this while systematic thinking attempts to reduce reality down analytically to individual isolated parts to somehow decode the world and reassemble it by a linear mechanical assembly line of reasoning systemic thinking towards the future is divergent which means multiple possible but different futures branching out instead of a single convergent end state envisioned by the organization ahead of time systemic design thinking attempts to generate and accommodate multiple inequivalent descriptions within a vastly complex context systemic thinking towards the future invests significant time energy and imagination towards multiple frames of reference that are often different paradigms or worldviews in play among various stakeholders competitors peers or rivals within a complex dynamic system when more than one paradigm or worldview dominates on how to make sense of reality systemic designers seek highly customized unique and tailored explanatory logics for possible action that may function in one of the possible futures but potentially be insufficient or even counterproductive in other envisioned futures it is the generation of these multiple divergent futures that creates a cognitive maneuver space for the security design team and subsequently the strategic design sponsor to consider and simulate future actions in a wider range of potentials whereas a convergent future end state a singular one is not the centralized focus in systemic thinking furthermore systemic design emphasizes the subjective along with the objective the tangible the rational and the analytic with the intangible the irrational the interpretivist if you will side of complex reality and by interpretivist we mean one must understand the context that one is in or the the old proverb that one can never step in the same river twice systemic designers acknowledge that even if a future design concept proves successful attempts to standardize or reproduce that same exact design construct into yet another operating principle or general practice for the organization is likely going to fail unduplicatable design lessons are not just an example of systemic design but indicative of how complex dynamic systems feature emergence and essentially learn from the design activities so that earlier design context dissolve in the arrival of the future system effectively so scenario planning when done properly it requires highly skilled designers working for many many months week after week working with sponsors and working over quadrants intentions and using sophisticated techniques to develop a range of different futures and then work with them to provide design opportunities and narratives so when we at jsow are providing design education for special operations or other agencies we don't really have the time to do this not normally in our education so we've provided here at jsow is a rapid fire way to provide one way of doing scenario planning very quickly for security contacts this is just one way of many but we're going to show you how to do that next [Music] while we do scenario planning in a traditional way with many of our advanced design courses as well as working with different organizations over longer term design inquiries in our three day or five day sessions that we do or our basic course what we have is something much quicker that can be done within a matter of hours with a small design team so what we draw from is the scenario planning fundamentals of multiple futures that all have to be considered simultaneously once again we're not eliminating futures such as in traditional koa selection in a military decision making process rather we're looking at our increasingly systemic range of futures of which some of those features have to be increasingly uncomfortable far-fetched unimagined or with great disadvantage from our current perspective or frame and this is essential and how do we accomplish this a quick heuristic aid that we've added to the formula is called the semiotic square now the semiotic square is an old philosopher's construct it's a metaphoric device of moving from corner a and then to corner b which is the opposite of a and then you must take both a and b combine it into a hybrid which now creates corner c and then the last part which is extremely divergent is corner d must have neither a nor b in it and what we do with that construct which can be used for a variety of different techniques but we apply it to generating multiple futures and what we do is first with future a in this corner it forms a z formation so we've nicknamed this the z technique for multiple futures for designing and starting in that top corner with a we ask our design team generate your idealized strategic future uh if everything were to be the way you want it to come out and this is normally what you see articulated the narrative in our our policy papers our security statements are are different mission statements at the campaign level where it's talking about say a democratically free and open afghanistan with a government that operates with low levels of corruption and is a ally and partner to western organizations and allies things of that nature where the the enemies have been defeated or treated to to a point where they're locally policeable and so these things are set into the future so that's where corner a is it becomes this what could happen if everything went the way we want it to now normally in the traditional military decision making process that's where everything ends everything becomes established in that single strategic goal or the the desired end state depending on what level that your organization tends to focus at and then that's where all the courses of action start setting up to achieve that single narrow future so in this process though that's just a point of departure for us to now generate multiple futures where that context will not happen so moving from corner a we then ask our design team can you come up with some a future b that is exactly opposite of future a and by opposite we mean everything that you said in this one future the first one now you have to consider a strategic future in the same time period where the conditions have radically changed in a completely different direction it doesn't matter which direction you go it just has to differentiate from a and the designers have to articulate what that means now this doesn't necessarily need to be doom and gloom it can just be a very different context and when we look at emergence in military history whether we're looking at what happened in the first 10 years after the end of the vietnam war what happened in the first 10 years after the 1945 and the defeat of germany or even the the last the next 10 years after the american revolution there's a wide range of things that happened that at that point in time it was not expected or it was anticipated to shift in a different direction and that's fine what we're looking for in corner b is some significant difference from corner a after we're done with corner b we then have the design team move to the third corner corner c in the low uh left position of the semiattic square that you can use as a tool to guide the teams as they move through their multiple futures now in corner c we're going to ask the students to make a hybrid future combining elements of both future a and future b and so this hybrid is something that will probably feel a little bit more familiar for the design team because we love combining courses of action we love bringing things back together convergently however this hybrid must be distinct and must have significant difference from both a and b for these futures to all work lastly we're going to move into corner d and this is where you want to have the design team spend as much time as possible so if you have two hours to do this technique spend no more than an hour on futures a b and c and try to push as much time as possible into this last step because corner d is really where the students the design team get extremely frustrated concerned challenged they need to take breaks corner d starts with a future that has neither a nor b in it which means it also eliminates corner c and so then this future becomes a very very different type of future for the strategic design that the team is working towards whether it's a confronting a nuclear china in 2030 looking at mexican drug cartels in 2025 which way the 75th ranger regiment needs to shift its entire mission set in preparation in a post afghanistan special operations context or perhaps how u.s space command needs to look at becoming the cocom next or space 2.0 for 2035. all these different challenges require a range of futures and with future d we're going to be looking at something completely different once the students have spent time on this you'll then have the design teams and if you're working in multiple teams have them present to other design teams what their multiple futures are [Music] so [Music] do [Music] okay [Music] two two [Music] after we've done the presentations of the multiple futures you now have a range of four different futures and if those aren't working or are insufficient for the the design challenge or if when engaging with the design sponsor that design sponsor finds those futures insufficient or flawed having the design team move back through the same attic square and that same process will create multiple iterations of different futures you can do this with as many design teams as you have we've done this with as many as 300 special operators where teams of five and six generated 30 or more different futures and from that huge range only a couple of them were taken out and used from a b c and d however remember that with multiple futures you're not going to be eliminating down to one future you must have that range of futures of which some of them are going to challenge and disrupt the desired future that normally is where the organization focuses towards you can use this multiple futures technique very quickly to get a design team to generate these multiple futures and then this provides the opportunity for generating a design prototype and experimenting with the design opportunities the design risks and those design consequences as they are applied or simulated in each of these multiple futures and then combining that into a design deliverable for that sponsor and that essentially completes the json z technique if you will on generating multiple features using the semiotic square [Music] so this is where design thinking provides scenario planning and multiple futures as a way of thinking divergently and increasing a systemic logic that looks at systems from a systemic or holistic view and we need to bring in different tools different techniques as well as different language in order to articulate this and apply design more uh positively so the organization can improvise adapt and overcome in increasingly creative and sophisticated ways military planning and how they think about the future has not really changed much in the 20th through the 21st centuries particularly if one looks at the methodology broadly planning from the tactical up to the arrangement of campaigns towards strategic or more precisely grand strategic goals all follow a similar shared logic the doctrine has changed and certainly some new language and various techniques are different but at the deeper systemic levels of how militaries envision future states and coordinate activities and decisions to bring about those desired future paths things have remained rather constant since the two great wars of the first half of the 20th century the next few graphics frame the overarching planning themes and explains why they function as so in this graphic the present is where our organization and military strategist or operational planner sits guided by the past as interpreted by the institution a military organization has declared what best practices are establish rules concerning warfare as well as what war itself is or is not and through specific language underpinned by metaphoric devices the military links mental models to military theories and validates this practice by examining the data and the observations on reality what you see here is the model that the militaries use and this is a linear and reverse engineered process of establishing the desired end state or strategic goal in the single future frame the red arrow shows the logical path of constructing this model and it starts at the desired accomplishment in the future and then mechanistically builds backwards towards the present state most militaries call the components along this process as lines of effort or lines of operation or also at times physical lines of operation note that all this is expressed in classical mechanics or newtonian physics metaphoric devices centers of gravity principles of mass speed maneuver and so on between the present state where the military strategist sits and this desired future singular end state are a range of undefined problems they are placed in a random arch in this graphic indicating that in any complex security context a range of diverse problems will exist the traditional decision making seeks to identify these problems drawing from the interpreted past where the military institution stacks up various coded solutions these solutions are subsequently paired with a range of problems until one problem appears to best be solved by the institutional solution and the organization can then advance along the line of effort ever closer towards the desired end state this is logically modeled as a sequential incremental and systematic process where additional information control prediction or analytic optimization moving forward towards the desired pre-established goal in a largely linear causal construct so why do we tend to formulate how the future ought to be in this way planning for military organizations drew from commercial or industrial planning techniques and strategies yet commerce in turn drew from military techniques as well this was part of the massive overlap of the industrial revolution the age of enlightenment as well as the development of modern management theories starting with factories and schools of management such as taylorism where people are essentially treated as automated tools or cogs in larger assembly line machines militaries seized upon taylorism ideas for management and used them extensively as military services grew increasingly larger in the first and second world wars as did conflict settings and campaign requirements the idea of reality being machine like in organizations akin to factories or production lines are key here in that gains in efficiency or speed lend to this belief that one can more effectively reach a desired future goal one can control the movement towards that goal one can potentially gain powerful prediction abilities and reduce risk as one increases the accumulation of information and control of the organization's range of behaviors through these mechanical like rules processes and even planning logic this would not end at the cessation of the second world war rather this way of framing decision and future states would somehow calcify in military institutional thought as well as in many commercial or industrial settings outside of the military the relatively stable economic periods of the 1950s and 1960s after the second world war changed as western advanced societies entered the 1970s and 1980s in what has sometimes been termed a post-industrial era for much of the developed western world in the industrial era leading up to the end of world war ii analysis and linear cause effect relationships essentially systematic logic formed the framework for scientific analysis strategy organizational form and management in the immediate rise of the early information age and the arrival of the first computers in the same period the science of cybernetics took hold not just across scientific disciplines in academia but throughout industry management organizational theories and into military organizations as well cybernetics addressed the relationship of problem sets that correspond to communication control and statistical mechanics cybernetic thinking would embrace computerized assimilation of more and more information so that one can focus attention to very specific micro segments of a larger system where decisions then could be fragmented into smaller and smaller segments sequentially arranged in a linear path for the organization to follow in the future like a trail of orderly reliable breadcrumbs in much of the 20th century this systematic way of strategizing about the future by conducting cybernetic systematic inquiries using a reductionist analysis of mass data would dominate industry and government policy and the promise of increased prediction and greater control with the advancement of increasingly more powerful computational assistance by smarter machines this continued to propel a shared validation that was one way to consider the future management and strategy thrive where forecasts are usually constructed on the assumption that tomorrow's world will be very much like today's world preset inventories of solutions available based on past experience and input output analytic reasoning were created and maintained within institutions particularly the military which has a form of military doctrine that categorizes these processes exclusively solutions await causal linkages with new problems encountered the organization then stacks these many groupings of proven solutions to potential problems and then relies upon rapid reliable recognition of any feature problem so that the assigned solution can be applied inputs link to rationalized outputs in a causal almost mechanical identify the problem connect the solution solve and continue based logic flows in this graphic the modern military logic for decision making that underpins nearly all planning from the tactical up to the grand strategic is depicted in iterations or cycles of encountering undefined problems in whatever security context the individual of the organization is thrown into an analytic process of drawing from existing institutionally sanctioned solutions and pairing them with a causal rationalization to a perceived problem is repeated over and over input a is combined with linkage b and tested to see if output c is reached if this fails the problem is either tested by another solution provided by the institution or the same solution might be reapplied perhaps using different techniques retraining the operators or changing out leadership so that the solution quote works this time and solves the perceived problem this does seem to function well in simplistic and complicated systems but it appears to break down rapidly in complex or chaotic systems systematic strategy making and single future state orientation and the visualization of these represent the dominant mode for military decision making in modern security institutions yet this approach has limitations and significant flaws in this dominant military analytic frame tomorrow is expected to follow a sequential obedient and relatively stable path stemming from a spring of yesterday's so that the systematic logic remember input will lead to output helps offer a relatively predictable future encased in the stability of solid analytic reasoning and general historic precedent in warfare any deviation would be an anomaly an outlier something that was possible but statistically remote and an area to be less concerned with in this way of framing reality when mechanistic analytically optimized planning encounters anything in reality that conflicts with the expectation that tomorrow ought to be mostly like yesterday that logic then becomes frustrated surprise occurs there's a feeling of a loss of control and paradox occurs or at least one experiences paradox analytic reasoning is thus applied not necessarily to explore the emergent qualities of this surprising or frustrating development but more to realign the existing military frame the dominant one to incorporate these anomalies and render them statistically as outliers or deviations within a still valid overarching linear sequence of those proposed activities and decisions the the linear plan we tend to interpret this difference in novelty not in ways that challenge the existing system or norms the interpretation must still validate the existing doctrine the dominant institutional practices and the overarching belief system so that the function of the military decision-making methodology might shift or gain some sophisticated adaptation the core form of that methodology and all doctrinal manifestations of the chosen theory model remain unchallenged this is why militaries continue to project singular future states from the strategic all the way down to immediate tactical levels in military planning this is essentially unchanged for the last two to three centuries of modern warfare professionalization yet the globalization and the rapid spread of information technology these major transformations we're seeing in in society today the increasing complexity of this new interconnected world is beginning to render predictive strategies in linear causality moot in much more dynamic security contexts emergence by definition can never be explained or even sufficiently defined within the frame of the legacy system the arrival of emergence requires entirely novel developments to include methods theory models and language in order to articulate and appreciate the novelty of the emergent system itself the traditional planning logic where systematic thinking sought to isolate all encountered problems in this causal rationalization so that the inputs could link to outputs is now considered insufficient in complex dynamic systems from a security design perspective at least the reverse engineering of existing solutions rationalized to future problems does not address emergent never before seen problems that violate all those existing rules and principles that really are are existing for those past solutions when encountering military surprise frustration and confusion in these emerging contexts where the things that used to work no longer do so the less familiar cognitive tools of imagination experimentation and reflective practice through design become quite valuable these will not operate in single frame future constructs and thus require a different model as well as alternative theories for warfare [Music] the idea of thinking divergently on futures has many different terms and many different names as well as certain companies that even have branded entire methodologies to this however they all share certain things in common whether referring to this as a strategic foresight or scenario planning or multiple futures this movement originated in the late 1960s when a small group of creative economists that were working for a major oil company began moving in a different direction now in this same organization they were investing heavily into very early computers the the computers that used to fill entire rooms and the promise of the computer techs and engineers was that with enough data and enough algorithms they would be able to predict and control and regulate oil conditions for them to be able to work their strategies from year to year however with this small group of engineers thinking differently in another room with just white boards and design techniques they were coming up with a very different way of thinking divergently about multiple futures we've now covered that virtually all operational tactical or local level planning as well as most strategic planning in military organizations over the last few centuries centered exclusively on some form of systematic logic the shift to design thinking and multiple futures presents today's military organizations with an opportunity for systemic logic to be introduced instead there are multiple ways to think about the future for design in a non-linear fashion the fastest and most comprehensive tool for doing this in a security context appears to be the inclusion of scenario planning or multiple futures into military design methodology albeit at the additional cost of explaining the systemic model for thinking about the future it becomes in direct conflict with the dominant systematic and single future and state logic that permeates all military decision making and doctrine thus far scenario planning has been used extensively across industry and academia since the 1970s where it first made a splash during the 1973 oil crisis this section will briefly explain the origins of scenario planning and also how until recently it has not been used in military decision making except in very rare and often design associated practice scenario planning has worked its way into nearly every fortune 500 company's strategic planning department as well as academia since the 1980s as a mainstream alternative and systemic mode of thinking towards complex adaptive systems yet in governmental security as well as military federal agencies and most law enforcement organizations only the dominant systematic logic for planning towards these single desired end states continues to be expressed in contemporary strategic thinking design and organizational planning efforts as well as established doctrine and practices a brief history of scenario planning is offered here so that you can consider how and why this alternative way of thinking towards the future provides value not just in industry but in security design and complexity in the late 1960s a small group of economists were working for the hudson institute and they developed a novel yet quite controversial at the time way of planning future strategies for organizations in complex environments led by economists jimmy davidson edward newland and pierre wack the royal dutch shell oil group developed this model of complex decision scenarios in the 1960s and the 1970s for the international oil company that was confronting an increasingly complex situation they did this while challenging the many dominant strategic making methodologies of the time by building upon pioneering economic work of helmut khan and anthony weiner of the hudson institute whack and his team of economists saw that the existing and dominant process of forecasting it became increasingly problematic over time particularly in the manner that the dominant managerial methodology taylorism school of management really turned everything into a mechanical systematic input output focused where existing organizational solutions are assigned to the problems as they are identified as previous sections have already belabored while they were working for show oil they gained a small foothold in the organization by occupying a few offices within the vast company but they were up against something much bigger at the same time that these disruptive and alternative ideas about strategizing futures was occurring on the chalkboards between economists that show oil big promises about predicting the future of the oil market were being made by different engineers associated with the first computers of the 1970s designed for industry in different rooms and at great expense as well as corporate attention massive computers filled the walls and rooms as software engineers and economists attempted to predict the future using data algorithms and specific metrics based upon historical data for shell oil yet the way that these two groups conceptualized how reality unfolded into future states was quite different as were the philosophical understandings of complexity emergence non-linearity and human decision making both individually and in groups without going into too much detail these two groups differed on how change occurred as well as the significance of past events what is the legacy system on indicating valid or increasingly irrelevant patterns into what may emerge for tomorrow this is quite important for corporate as well as military or political strategizing on what to invest in or develop for tomorrow's challenges and where to reduce or eliminate as wasteful or irrelevant an oil company might continue with the growth and development provided that next year's forecasting environment for oil supply demand and value remains relatively constant and as long as the next year appears to follow the last few years or analysis on what is already known or believed concerning the economic behaviors of the oil market any emergent future that is not already predictable from today might be considered far too risky or even unimaginable to consider in that quote the historical data does not support such a development end quote which really means one cannot attempt to do something unproven if only due to the best practices of historical precedence demanding you continue to do with what worked before until they stopped working only then new ideas might be experimented upon yet emergence always occurs and this is what whack and his group were thinking about especially when we wish it would not occur and often becomes increasingly costly for organizations that fail to heed that the dynamic changing qualities of complex systems tend to reject legacy constructs validated by yesterday in the late 1960s wack observed that traditional planning was based upon forecasts and he said quote these worked reasonably well in the relatively stable 1950s and 60s for oil companies and other related industries end quote yet the increasing globalization and technological boom of the 1970s and onward made previously stable systems anything but predictable oil demands expanded as societies increased their wealth size and consumption yet conflict and interstate tensions also impacted the oil market in profound and often novel ways things that we had never seen before were happening and these were disenfranchising or disrupting all the established best practices as well as those linear prediction models for law enforcement professionals one could apply the gradual shift in organized crime from large centralized hierarchies or mafias which had particular strengths and weaknesses towards an emergent organized crime network composed of smaller more nimble cells that could dynamically shift or transform if the illicit environment was altered this can be seen in the large colombian drug cartels of the 1980s morphing into today's smaller more decentralized microcartel networks that avoid the hazards that cause the earlier larger cartels to be defeated by counter drug state activities the same can be said of cyber crime human trafficking or the transformation of domestic terrorism from the 20th into the 21st century the older versions of these illicit enterprises were in retrospect more stable predictable and essentially controllable through older forms of law enforcement and policies as well as security activities newer dynamic and emergent forms are radically different requiring sophisticated and often entirely dissimilar ways of strategizing and thinking about futures in the more stable at least economically and in terms of industrial actions 1950s and 1960s companies like shell followed a linear and a highly mechanistic planning cycle that worked towards quantitative data it was tested validated it was reoccurring they could predict off of it they used convergence as in increased uniformity reliability efficiency gaining control as well as an increased expectation that any future should usually be some kind of extension of these past patterns and experiences for whack and his team of radical experimenters they proposed something completely different writing on the development of scenario planning wax said quote too many forces work against the possibility of getting the right forecast the future was no longer stable it had become a moving target no single right projection can be deduced from past behavior end quote wack realized that in order to prepare an organization for a radically different future environments and potential paradigm shifts for that organization and how a complex system behaves and how the organization needs to think inside of that change he needed a strategic model that did far more than make a few accurate forecasts within systematic logic instead a systemic way of thinking about multiple futures would become more useful in addressing these dynamic emergent systems single desired futures were out multiple simultaneously coexisting potential futures would be generated using scenario planning with each of these future states demonstrating different combinations of overlap such as commonality convergence or codependence but also tensions between the futures where divergence difference independence occurs as well as the notion of interplay between these futures novel and emerging qualities that do not exist in any legacy frame or understanding today that's why the notion of interplay is emergent it exists in a new frame that we in our current legacy system either can't realize or can't even imagine yet thinking with multiple futures does not permit the systematic logic where recognizable inputs can be linked to those understandable or expected outputs in that traditional mechanistic rationalized manner instead a scenario based approach must change the decision makers assumptions about how the world works and compel them to reorganize their mental model of reality to consider these different futures scenario planning would use the term planning in a new and quite distinct context just as security design today presents a very different way for security organizations law enforcement and policy makers to consider security on complex systems versus traditional managerial or institutional planning does some might consider planning and design as problematic terms in both contexts which also offers yet another parallel between the shell scenario planning movement in the 1970s and the current security design movement of the 21st century scenario planning does not enhance or bolt onto the legacy way of linear planning it's an entirely different mode of thinking about the future this is quite significant in that traditional military planning methods the model dictates the construction of multiple courses of action or koas to be conducted during the joint planning process military decision making methodology or other related method multiple koas are not the same as multiple futures each koa developed whether 2 or 20 in a systematic military planning model are different actions synchronized to accomplish the same singular desired end state koas are different ways to get at the same singular future while multiple futures are very different emerging contexts that profoundly alter the future context that the military and other stakeholders and adversaries might find themselves in as the complex security context undergoes the emergence and this transformation in scenario planning one might play multiple koas in these multiple futures so that in some futures koa 1 might outperform coast 2 and 3 but in another future koa 3 outperforms co is 1 and two this obviously violates military systematic logic and renders things like cold war gaming and koa decision making increasingly fragile and confusing scenario planning operates with systemic logic while the joint planning process or mdmp they use systematic logic applying courses of action scenario planning does offer ways to construct quote unquote courses of action but designers must distinguish these between what scenario planning offers and the traditional koas of systematic military planning logic a methodology that employs systematic logic such as the linear planning processes that we've talked about in single futures does not become more systematically capable with simply an infusion of systemic logic or adding scenario planning to a the joint planning process they really remain separate in distinct ways of thinking acting upon reality because they're operating with different models using different language that ties to different theories about warfare in this model the heuristic aid of employing multiple features of scenario planning using the semiotic square model is one way to apply this theory of systemic logic in warfare using a different cognitive model that requires once again the different language different metaphoric devices to render the data collected in a different fashion for the military organization designers need to understand that systemic thinking about the future just can't be reduced into a single desired preferred future and state or strategic goal one is not generating multiple futures to then subsequently eliminate them to return to the single desired end state future of systematic thinking it's not going to be purely analytical or linear causal logic it just doesn't work in that generating systematic thinking moves towards multiple futures scenario planning with multiple futures within a systemic logic is one way to inform the organization so that they should apply sequential systematic logic towards a short-term goal but they're doing this while also appreciating the emergent non-linear and dynamic qualities of the larger complex system they are unavoidably operating in and that is where the value of systemic logic and concepts such as scenario planning produce the most value for the organization for more opportunities and design facilitation videos be sure to subscribe to thinkjsow and check out our other playlists for ted talks podcasts interviews lectures and other facilitation techniques that we apply here at jsow including this custom one that's unique to the json design education provided here for u.s special operations command thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you